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  • Beqanna

    COTY

    Assailant -- Year 226

    QOTY

    "But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura


    fallen fruit is all rotten in the middle; loam
    #1

    Blind and whistling just around the corner
    And there's a wind that is whispering something

    Strong as hell but not hickory rooted


    Forget her name, is what she tells herself, because the mare who smells of earth and life should not exist within her history. The history she has already rewritten – she went into the fire and came out stronger rather than burnt; she is the one who helped stop the world’s ruin. She is the one who ate her own flesh rather than give into the strange demon’s greed.
    She is a survivor who was never meant to be such things.

    Hope’s like a seed, long-buried, and it’s not a thing she means to nurture, but the way she recalls the mare’s dark eyes and the way she said her name, well – the seed grows.
    She tries to distract herself, she grows flowers, vines, creates impossible meadows of exotic flowers not meant for the environment, they only last days (sometimes hours) before they wither and die. She does not mind. They are a distraction and nothing else.
    The tall grass flattens before her, as if she is Noah parting the red sea. It’s a useless show of power, but it keeps her busy, this manipulation, the creation and destruction of plants.
    (The only thing she keeps alive is the hickory tree. The one where she carved their names. The one that reminds her of who she is – or, who she is supposed to be.)
    Again, she tells herself the mantra: Forget her name.

    hickory
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    #2
    Hickory.
    Hick-or-y.

    The name is like gospel on her lips; part of that forbidden fruit that she has taken a bite out of and can still feel the meaty pulp of it sliding down her throat, wet - slick - delicious;

    Her pond is still thick and green, scummed over. It lets go of her sable flesh with a sick sucking sound that leaves green algae in her hair, but it is lighter than the dark raw emerald of her eyes. They blink back the dreams of bay fur and growing things; blink in recognition of the faint slants of light that pester her shadowy patch of forest. She has not left her pond or the forest’s clutch in years; cannot remember when last she strode forth, looked high and then looked low, but found neither him in his buckskin glory nor her in her simple bay dress, making things sprout magically from seed and dirt. But something beckons - -

    Something, no --
    Someone,
    Brings her forth.

    Her tread is soft but firm upon the earth; there is no sashay in her hips - it was never needed around Hickory, the manipulations were unnecessary and forgotten, as they had been only with one other (him, buckskin and magnificent but the memory of him dulls, slackens, and he is but a name fast becoming cobwebbed with age). Loam is thinned by time and her own ignorance of basic needs; she has feasted on the few acorns that roll her way, lost from some squirrel’s stash, and her teeth have torn up all the grass around her pond in her part of the forest. She has taken to licking the moss off the bellies of stones she rolls over with a careful hoof, but she is not thinking of that kind of sustenance now but of another, of bay fur and black hair blowing across a pair of eyes that conjure up all manner of vegetation and life, thick and mothering.

    Loam almost longs for Hickory in a parched, hungry manner.
    She knows that who is she has risen for, from her scummed over pond (the algae dries upon her own fur, blotchy and familiar like a second skin) and who she watches now walk forth through the meadow, the grass parting like a sea before her every step - Hickory is like some goddess moving amongst them, but they are too stupid to notice her. Loam notices, her gaze sharp and hungry with need and the beginnings of a desire that she knows is very wrong but oh so very right! It beats in her, like an angry bird battering itself against rib-bars of the cage that holds it, trapped and throbbing and over-tight. She feels claustrophobic for a moment, shadow and sky are far too oppressive as is the distance that separates them and before she knows it, Loam is running towards her and skidding to a stop only feet from the only thing she has craved besides power; Hickory.

    Her name is like a psalm in Loam’s dark mouth,
    “Hickory.”
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